Currently Browsing AdWords

Sometimes when you setup a new AdWords search campaign in older accounts, you may find that the Settings tag doesn’t contain some of the usual items like ad scheduling, keyword matching options, or “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping.” It’s as if the controls have disappeared. The reason these “advanced settings” are hidden is because […]

AdWords is a very powerful, flexible system, and with that comes complexity. This complexity can obscure some very important information, such as if and when you’re running out of your daily budget. This is where one of the most important and frequently overlooked numbers comes into play: Impression Share (IS). This is the percentage of […]

AdWords’ default “All visitors” remarketing list has an unmodifiable 30-day look-back window or “membership duration.” Sometimes you want something longer (or shorter). In particular, you may want to save AdWords budget by excluding people from seeing an ad after they’ve clicked on one. (Note that there’s an upper limit of 180 days for search, 540 […]

Why pay twice for the same visitor? You can save money in AdWords by excluding ad impressions for people who have already clicked on an ad. This may be appropriate if you feel that the first click generates enough awareness that subsequent visits would occur through natural results. For example, one of our clients is […]

In a victory for sophisticated clients everywhere, AdWords has announced that they will re-enable the ability to indefinitely opt-out of ad rotation optimization. Several months ago AdWords started to force advertisers’ ads to rotate if they were not edited within 30 days. At that time I (and presumably many others) expressed concern about how this […]

Google’s remarketing ads are great for advertiser, but they can be annoying for some users. As someone who manages advertising, I’m hyper-aware of what ads are showing. Also my competitive research means that I could be remarketed to constantly for products I have less than zero interest in buying. It turns out that you can […]

We have recently developed a new tool, our Google Analytics Tag Validator, to help diagnose issues constructing URLs for advertising and tracking. If you’re tagging landing page URLs for AdWords, adCenter, Facebook advertising, and so on, this tool will help make sure that your composite URLs are properly constructed. Among other things, it alerts you if […]

While it’s obvious that ad position effects cost, does it effect conversion rate? For example, does the top position AdWords ad get a higher percentage of clicks turning into conversions than an ad further down the page? Google has conducted studies and developed numerical models that indicate that if such a relationship exists, it is […]

I’ve blogged before about how to interpret CTR and what conditions are necessary for a valid comparison of two ads. In one recent case we created two identical ads that went to different landing pages so that we could test the effectiveness of each landing page. The assumption is that each ad — being identical — […]

Google is working on a mechanism for collecting and sharing users impressions of search results. The system is called +1. It allows users to give a virtual “thumbs-up” on sites that they like by clicking on a small symbol next to their listing in search results. This applies to both ads and natural results. The […]